The cognitive neuroscience of eye contact

The latest Trends in Cognitive Sciences has a fantastic review article on the cognitive neuroscience of eye contact, demonstrating how this fleeting social connection has a powerful impact on the mind and brain.

Past research has shown that making eye contact has an impact on social perception and subsequent behaviour.

The article notes that eye contact has been found to increase the likelihood of recognising someone and helps work out whether someone is male or female.

It also seems to increase general arousal and fixes attention – we’re less likely to notice things happening on the periphery of our vision if we’re staring at a face with eye contact than at a face where the eyes are diverted to the side.

In neuroimaging studies eye contact has been found to increase activity in a group of areas (medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal gyrus, fusiform gyrus) that have often been associated with social interaction across a wide range of studies.

Interestingly, the authors suggest that basic eye contact information might be detected by a specific subcortical mechanism that quickly detects simple light/dark differences, presumably to pick out the direction of the pupil, which then triggers more complex social processing to make sense of its social meaning.

It’s an interesting field, not least because recognising eye contact and following the gaze direction of others are thought to be some of the most fundamental building blocks on which social communication develops in babies.

Children with autism have been found to show radically different patterns of eye contact recognition and gaze direction, and the authors suggest that one cause could be a problem with the these eye contact neural circuits which leads to slow or impaired social understanding.

3 Comments

“Children with autism have been found to show radically different patterns of eye contact recognition…”
I believe babies look at the mother and fathers faces. Eye contact. Face searching in babies is know.
Is this change of eye contact in autism all of a sudden, like in a day or two?
If not , then the change in eye contact may be a learned behaviour.

My comment disappeared?
Again, I ask.
What is the time frame of “Children with autism have been found to show radically different patterns of eye contact recognition”
A day or a year?
I presume as babies the child looked at faces, as is built in to the brain.

Very nice post!
Eye gaze cues are of primary importance for communication.
According to some research by D. G. Amaral, N. Emery, and the great D. I. Perrett, eye contact depends on the integrity of the amygdala.
Because some regions in the temporal cortex (associated with viewing and processing social stimuli) are conected profussively with the amygdala making eye contact to be primed emotionally in order to be more easily remembered, attended and affecting subsequent social behaviour.